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Switching a site from Hostgator to Media Temple in a few easy steps

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I made the decision to move some of my mission critical WordPress websites from Hostgator to (mt) Media Temple and so far I have had a very positive experience with the company. The process of migrating a website was fairly simple because of an auto-migration feature offered by Media Temple where all I had to do was enter a few credentials for my FTP and WordPress logins and they took care of the rest.

Specifically, I took the following steps (combination of instructions from Media Temple and my own precautions):

Create a Local ‘Migration’ Folder

Export All Posts from Current Site

Make a Local Copy of wp-content file via FTP

Export Database Backup

Provide Media Temple with My Login Credentials

Initiate Migration

Repoint Nameservers

There were a few hiccups that I ran into along the way.

The first site I migrated did not look the same as the staging site when I moved it to Production. This turned out to be a simple issue with the theme where I had not activated the default menu. Once I did that, it was all good.

Replicating a .htaccess file redirect that I had in place with one of my sites still does not seem to be working

A Final Bonus

It is such a breath of fresh air to have a human to speak to when I need support. Media Temple offers as one of their support functions the ability to call a support agent using Skype. I was never on hold more than a couple of minutes and each time the person that helped me was knowledgeable and pointed me in the right direction. This further reinforced my resolve that moving my mission critical sites to Media Temple was the right thing to do.